Ming Jiajing: Starting from Immortality

Chapter 67 Hai Rui takes action, Third Master Xu!
Tian Youlu knelt down.

He didn't care about the mud on the ground and protested: "Tang Zun, these things really have nothing to do with me."

The household owner of the land does not match the fish scale map, and the cultivator is not equal to the actual owner of the land, which is called strange land.

The strange fields in Chun'an County, or the strange fields in the whole of Jiangnan, are all tragedies caused by officials and businessmen taking advantage of natural disasters and man-made disasters to loot.

The Xin'an River embankment is repaired every year in the counties and prefectures through which the river passes, but floods still occur every year.

Take this year as an example, floods submerged most of the fertile farmland in Chun'an.

According to the court regulations, at this time, Chun'an officials should cooperate with the court in disaster relief and compensate the people's losses.

However, before the people could recover from their grief, documents arrived from the provincial and prefectural governments, marking out 10,000 acres of flooded land to be developed into fish ponds.

At that time, Hai Rui had not yet arrived in Chun'an County. As the county magistrate, Tian Youlu had no choice but to follow the instructions of the provincial and prefectural governments.

The land they depended on for survival was expropriated to be used as fish ponds. Naturally, the people whose land was expropriated did not agree to this, so they jointly wrote a letter and went to the county government to make a scene.

However, Tian Youlu was afraid of his superiors and intimidated his subordinates, so he directly ordered the yamen runners to drive the people away. The water and fire sticks were ruthless, and the people lost their land and homes, so they gathered in these broken caves to live.

Hai Rui has always hated government officials like Tian Youlu. He summarized them with five words: "greedy, evil, deceitful, cunning and stubborn", and called them "people with the five evils".

Seeing Tian Youlu's appearance, he became really angry and kicked him into the sewage next to him.

Tian Youlu was also able to endure it, so he just lay there for a long time without getting up. However, Hai Rui was not ready to let him go, and shouted, "Let me ask you, when you confiscate the people's land, you have to give them silver. After the people signed and sealed the land, did you embezzle the silver?"

A thousand-year-old field has eight hundred owners.

But let alone eight hundred owners, even if there are eight thousand owners, if the land is requisitioned, no matter whose land it is, the land owner must be paid the land requisition silver.

Even if the emperor expropriates land, he still has to pay landowners silver. This is how business works.

But which of the people living in the caves received any money for the land acquisition?

Tian Youlu was just pretending, but when he heard the master talking about the land expropriation money and blaming him for the land expropriation money, he immediately knelt upright like a spring and said, "Master, the land expropriation money has nothing to do with me now."

From beginning to end.

The provincial and prefectural governments did not allocate any money for land acquisition, so even if Tian Youlu and the officials from Chun'an County Government wanted to embezzle a single penny, they could not.

"Tang Zun, after we got the deed of 10,000 mu of land, people came from the provincial government, but they didn't convert the fertile land into a fish pond. They just reported it as a fish pond."

Tian Youlu pointed to the acres of mulberry fields not far from the cave and explained, "The tax on fish ponds is less than the tax on farmland. The people from the provincial government are planning to use the good farmland, or even the mulberry fields, to pay the tax on fish ponds and make a profit from it."

Among all taxes, the tax on fish ponds is the lowest, the tax on rice fields is higher, and the tax on mulberry fields is the highest.

The imperial court exempted Chun'an from taxes, but only for three years, not forever.

The plan of the people from the provincial government mentioned by Tian Youlu was very simple. After three years, mulberry trees would still be planted on the land, but taxes would only be paid in the form of fish ponds.

When it came to the collection of taxes for the imperial court, Hai Rui gradually showed murderous intent.

Taxation is the foundation of a country.

If everyone uses this method to evade taxes, how much tax revenue can the court collect?
Tian Youlu was trembling with fear and continued, "Since the land has not been converted into fish ponds, the land tax will be deferred."

The so-called postponement.

It's just a euphemism for the fact that the people from the provincial government failed to convert the fields into fish ponds, the people could not get the land acquisition money, and the people's fields were swallowed up by the provincial government.

Li Shizhen was stunned by these words. Xu Wei's mouth was twitching. The two cities of Zhejiang and Hangzhou were really good at blocking each other.

I have requisitioned the land. If you want to turn it into a fish pond, you need to pay the land requisition fee.

But the land acquisition silver was issued to me because I converted the farmland into fish ponds. Now, I haven’t converted the fish ponds, so why should I be issued the land acquisition silver?

The strangeness of Guitian is really strange!

Ever since.

On the fish scale map, the owners of the fields still belonged to the common people, but the land properties had in fact been transferred. The common people who had no land and could not get the land acquisition money had no choice but to sell their property and make a living here.

In the whole incident, the Chun'an County Government was just the "thugs" of the provincial government. Tian Youlu was very hesitant: "My Lord, I didn't get a penny from the whole incident!"

Hai Rui looked at Tian Youlu with eyes that were almost the same as looking at a dead person: "Let me ask you, where is the person from the provincial government who is going to take over the land?"

Tian Youlu shuddered, guessing that Hai Rui was going to cause trouble for the people from the provincial government, and said hesitantly, "Yes, at the Hongfu Restaurant."

Hongfu Restaurant.

It is built on the Xin'an River embankment.

Of course no other buildings were allowed in such an important place, but under the influence of power, the restaurant was built like that.

When Hai Rui and Xu Wei arrived with their men, they saw a singing girl in the restaurant playing the pipa and singing "The Buried Cricket: Partridge Sky" by Ji Dian, an elder by the West Lake: "The cricket, Wang Yanzhang, has one short whisker and one long whisker. Because he has thirty-six whiskers, people always call him Wang Tieqiang. Don't worry, don't be sad, everything in the world is impermanent. Last night, a severe frost suddenly fell, it seemed like a dream."

As the singing played, Hai Rui walked into the restaurant, only to see it filled with gamblers. Tables of all sizes were covered with banknotes, small change, gold hairpins, and pearls.

The elegant thing to gamble on in Jiangnan is not chess or cards, but insect fighting.

The spectators around observe the quality of the fighting insects, exchange a few words, and then place bets. This is called "buying a horse."

The bets were almost placed, and the crickets on both sides were aroused to fight, sharpening their wings and chirping.

The gambler shouted, and both sides of the fight took a step back. The gambler raised the wooden gate, and the two fighting insects immediately pounced on each other and fought in the fighting pot.

Not long after, one cricket was bitten all over and fled around the jar. The victorious one raised its antennae high and chirped incessantly.

The gambler announced the winner on the spot. The winner put his fighting insect back into the cage and took a good rest, while the loser was extremely angry and threw the fighting insect on the ground and stomped on it a few times in anger.

The winner of the fight was Shen Yishi. Today he was wearing a thin silk shirt with more than a hundred flowers embroidered on it, but all the flowers were different and were dotted in different places. The colors were also well matched. He bowed to the nobleman in front of him and said, "Mr. Xu San, I'm honored."

There is no other family other than the Xu family of Songjiang Prefecture that can use the character Xu as their surname and be addressed respectfully by the richest businessman in Jiangnan.

The third son of Minister of Revenue Xu Jie, Xu Ying.

Unlike his eldest brother Xu Fan and second brother Xu Kun who followed their father to Beijing, the third son Xu lived in Songjiang for a long time and traveled around the south of the Yangtze River for his family.

After learning that Zhejiang officials had used 35,000 acres of fertile land in various prefectures to pay for the one million dan of grain, Shen Yishi, as a businessman, knew that it was not good to eat alone, so he joined forces with the Xu family of Songjiang Prefecture in exchange for 15,000 acres of fertile land.

The bet of the insect fight between the two just now was a thousand acres of fertile land. Tens of thousands of taels of silver were just wasted. No wonder Mr. Xu San was so angry.

Just when Young Master Xu San wanted to fight again, his eyes noticed someone coming from behind the crowd.

"Take them all!"

Hai Rui's voice drowned out the entire crowd, "Take the money! Don't leave a single cent behind!"

(End of this chapter)